Community Learning Experience

My community learning was done with Special Olympics Ottawa, mainly from home and as volunteering during events and participating in meetings. My duties included translating brochures and contacting all the school boards and schools in Ottawa to send out brochures to them as well as email introducing Ottawa Special Olympics to them.

Special Olympics Ottawa’s goal as stated on their website is to contribute to the physical, social and psychological development of people with intellectual disabilities through positive, successful experiences in sport. The focus of the Special Olympics movement is to promote sport programming for such individuals in their community. However, in keeping with the philosophy of sport training, the organization also promotes competition at higher levels. This is accomplished with the staging of Provincial Games (held every two years) and National and International Games (held every four years). Furthermore, the organization does not seek to restrict athletes to competition with other Special Olympians and in fact, promotes integration of its athletes into community based generic sports programs whenever possible.
Ottawa currently have 600 athletes ranging from 8-88 and over 250 volunteers. My goal with reaching out to schools in the Ottawa region is too get potential athletes the information about our programs so that they can be involved with other atheletes and develop their full sporting potential.

The organization had no current material in French, as my first language is French I translated the brochures and sent out information to all french schools boards in the Ottawa region. Reaching out to more students who previously may not have been given the opportunity, because of lack of information sent out to their schools.

Also part of my community involement was and is to participate in a swim meet event that takes place at the Brewer Pool. Around 60 athletes are currently registerred. This event was suppose to have taken place on March 9th but as we had 54 cm of snow between March 7th and 9th the competition was cancelled for security reasons. This has been pushed to April 4th. Athletes from the Ottawa, Arnprior and Kingston region are participating. This competition is for me to see how it will play out at a bigger one organized for the school athletes that takes place in early May, one that I will help with as well.

The social inequity that surronds these athletes are big, all have learning disabilities and many have languages disabilities which impacts directly their income and social class. As seen in class one of the interventions possible is health promotion, which is exactly what special olympics is doing.

Special Olympics Ottawa is directly relates to social inequality and healt because as we know most programs and most sports training are not for athletes with special needs, so they, the special needs athletes tend to take the back seat with maintaining their health and thus far living a healthy life. With Special Olympics they are able to take part in activities and sporting events as well as developping new skills to improve their health and their well beeing. As well as in the long term increase longevity.

Also another very important way to reduce social inequality between disabled and non disabled individuals is integrating both social spheres together. Special Olympics developps social skills of athletes while interacting through sports. Skills as motivation and self esteem, self confidence and much more witch will improve social skills.

Although the community learning experience has been a overall good experience it has not enhanced my understanding of social inequality and health. It was indirectly related but more of a communications placements rather than a social work placement.My hours were spent mostly doing research on all school in Ottawa to target schools that offer special learning programs for children with learning disabilities. Sending out emails, getting things approved and sent out to schools proved to be a difficult, the process since there was no paid staff with Special Olympics had to go through a committee that meets every Monday. For example an email draft sent to a board member to be approved, the baord will look at it on a Monday, get back to me with changes, I will need to hand it back for approval at the next Monday and then back and forth like this for a minimum of 3 weeks work for one single email. The process was very frustrating with having no supervisor.

On this subject, supervisor